Clipper Linked with Blinker on a Novell Server

[Guest_imported]

Hi,

We have an clipper application running on a novell server. There are 10 client connected to the server. The program is linked with blinker 5.3 and uses DbaseIV NTX databases.

The program handles the sales for 300 shop. Per shop there are 10 different databases with an average size op 15MB. Then there are 10 databases for all the customers. The largest is 250MB with +- 800.000 records.

At night the application communicates with all the shop to read out the daily sales and sends the modifications made during the day.

After every communication he updates the databases. This worked nicely till a few months ago. Sometimes during the communication and updating off the files i get 2 different errors : 1. DBSEEK (0) INTERNAL ERROR 19.
2. GPF : DOS ERROR 4

Does anybody have an idee

 

[TonHu]

My first reaction is that you have hit on one of the bugs in the NTX (and maybe the MDX) indexdrivers. They (both) will crash when used on larger datasets. When I reached this point, my first solution was to regenerate all indexes during nighthours, but finally I switched to the CDX driver (Foxpro) with compound indexes (all in one file) and never had a (index)problem since! Performance also goes up by some 300%, but that may be of no importance to you, processing at night s-)
Btw, the errors we got where pseudo-random, including 19's and 4's like you had, and the illusive 'unknown error'.

IMHO you have a few options:
- Keep the clipper apps, and switch to another indexdriver
- Switch to XBase++/FiveWin/Harbour/Whatever Windows versions of xBase you like most, and clean out your source, effectively creating a 'decent' 32 bit app, with larger limits, and other (ODBC/SQL) database-support
- Switch to some other Language, Delphi jumps to my mind immediately ;-), (but that is actually the same as my prev. suggestion.)

Goodluck!

HTH, TonHu

 

[GriffMG]

DOS Error 4 is related to the number of files which are open. Check your file handles on the workstation running the app. Check config.sys on windows 95/98, I think it is an entry in the system.ini under Windows ME called PerVMFiles or somesuch and for NT I think it sits in the config.nt file buried in the winnt/system32 folder.

It is probably temporary files that are causing the problem (as they weren't required until recently).

Other limits to the number of files can be defined in your Blinker link file on the BLINKER EXECUTABLE CLIPPER F255;R64
line.

Some Netware clients have a setting for themselves, and early versions of Netware have a maximum number of files as well!

Bets of luck Regards

Griff
Keep [Smile]ing